This week I was at IDG’s LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York City. My task there was to take the video from the three keynotes and get them up on our various Web sites. (You can see the results here, here and here.) The problem I ran into was the videos were being recorded by the hotel A/V staff direct to DVD. Great if you want to slip it into a DVD player and watch it. Bad if you want to encode them and put them on the Web. I tried a number of free (and one paid) utilities to convert the VOB files into something useful, but to no avail. The closest I got was a nice picture, but no audio – which defeats the whole purpose of a keynote. My solution was to trudge through snow and sleet over to a Best Buy and purchase a Dazzle USB video input device and portable DVD player with A/V Out cables so that I could recapture the video into my computer. The process worked, but was tedious. Fast forward to today. I get back to the office still needing to do the third and final keynote from yesterday afternoon. While waiting for the DVD player to arrive on the FedEx truck (shipped it back instead of carrying it on the plane), I noticed an e-mail from a PR person announcing that version 4 of Movavi VideoSuite is due out on Tuesday (Feb 20) and that I could download a preview copy now. It claims to be able to rip DVDs and videos into formats for YouTube, iPods and just about any other use. Hmmm….
I loaded up the software, popped in the keynote DVD, selected the uncompressed AVI output format and hit “Convert”. Nothing… Well, nothing fast. The status bar claimed there was over 2 hours left in the conversion process. Since the keynote was under an hour, it would have been quicker to use my analog method. Cancelling that job, I switched the output format to MPEG-2. Wouldn’t you know it, Movavi VideoSuite processed the file in about 15 minutes. Sweet! I threw the resulting file at my Sorenson Compression Suite and had a useable Flash Video file in about the same time it would have taken me to just capture the keynote the old way. If I had only figured this out Wednesday I would have saved myself a ton of time and hair. Needless to say, I am adding the Movavi VideoSuite to my arsenal of tools. A single-user license is only $60, so it’s work checking out.
